Kelly Hurd has been pitching us to producers for Discovery so I sent him footage and story lines.

 

 

Some things that are always true of our surgery and vet visits:

 

Unless you have been involved in these very tense situations, it is hard to explain how stressed out everyone is and our coping mechanism is to joke around and talk about things that have nothing to do with the work at hand as a way of being able to deal with these life and death situations.

 

In most cases we go to the vet not knowing if we will have to make the awful decision to euthanize one of our family members, because loading a cat up and taking them offsite to a vet clinic is the last ditch option to save their lives.  After 22 years of doing this, we know that there will almost never be a clear choice to make and we will almost always be burdened with making a decision that could result in lingering misery for the cat and then still having to put them out of their misery days, weeks or months later after trying every thing we can to give them a good quality of life.

 

A lot of the editing will require you to use common sense about what is appropriate or not.  Often in these videos you will hear people talking about other vet situations or clients, and unless it is about one of our other cats, that audio can’t be included.  The ultimate goal of these vet videos is to show the details of the surgery for vet students and make our vets look great; because they are.

 

Some clowning around is OK to show, but it should be narrated as to why we act this way in the face of such serious business.  Sometimes, while a cat is waking up, we let volunteers touch the cats, as they are never allowed to touch cats otherwise.  I would not include this in your finished products though, because we do not want to encourage people to pay to touch big cats.

 

You will see us often taking a lot of photos and videos because these kinds of surgeries are rare and documentation even more so.  That is why these surgery videos could be so helpful to other cats if done well.

 

In the videos I have sent you, this is the sequence of events, so you know what is going on.  If you watch them in this same order, I won’t have to duplicate such detail on latter videos, because you will know what is happening.

 

Task List

 

1 Four minute or less video of the surgery or vet visit with no graphic imagery.

 

1 Twenty minute video with the graphic imagery; suitable for both a vet student and the public, who is fully prepared for what they will see.

 

WARNING SLIDES:  Be sure to warn viewers before showing something like surgery both in a warning slide and in the early part of the accompanying text.

 

Vet Joseph Lion. http://bigcatrescue.org/joseph/

 

Joseph stopped eating and stopped taking his pain meds, so we sedated him for diagnostics.  Due to his age (16) we didn’t want to risk a long trip to the University of Florida, if we could assess him here, so we invited Dr. Fay Hererro, DVM, from the Odessa Equine Clinic, to bring a portable X-ray machine.  Dr. Justin Boorstein invited Dr. Tim Jones to help w/ anesthesia.  They drew blood, gave fluids, administered antibiotics and did the X-rays they could, but the portable X-ray machine was just not good enough for abdominal X-rays.

 

Joseph did not respond to the antibiotics and fluids and continued to refuse food and water, so we asked the Humane Society of Tampa Bay if we could use their X-ray and Sonogram machines, after hours, and took him in for more X-rays, blood work, fluids, a longer lasting antibiotic and a sonogram.

 

Nothing of note was found in all of these diagnostics, except a possibility of neoplasia, which are masses in the abdomen.  We had hoped that the antibiotics, fluids and appetite stimulants would help get him up and eating again, but they didn’t.

 

We discussed euthanasia, with both vets, and Dr. Wynn suggested a last ditch effort of injecting him with a steroid.  It had been 8 days since he had eaten anything and